Stimulating, non-hierarchical group improvisation in music – that which is resistant to sloppiness, incoherency and ultimately, irrelevancy – comes to successful fruition only with the tremendous efforts of highly skilled, compatible and coordinated musicians responding relationally in the...

This second disc from Dutton of orchestral music by Walter Braunfels continues a small revival of the German composer’s music, which appears to have been jumpstarted by the 2010 release of his early opera Die Vogel from the Los Angeles Opera. All three of the works here are world...

Gleaned from a week’s worth of live gigs at NYC’s famed Village Vanguard venue in May, 2014, Steve Wilson & Wilsonian’s Grain, Live in New York: The Vanguard Sessions, a subtitle pregnant with dual or triple significance, insists at one level that we may be (and to judge from the...

This recording of 20th-century music from Italy, the British Isles, Canada, and Germany uses oboe, bassoon, and piano in various combinations. Everything is tonal, lyrical, imaginative, and truly beautiful.
After spending many years holding principal positions in orchestras in the United...

FourTune is an ensemble of excellent Polish musicians who have put together a terrific program of later 20th-century Polish music for flute and string trio. The flute is clearly the soloist in Krzysztof Meyer’s Capriccio per sei strumenti, written in 1987 and 1988. The piece is a...

German recorder player and Baroque music specialist Barbara Heindlmeier has recently released a fascinating album of recorder sonatas by one A.H. Schultzen, an enigmatic composer of the German Baroque whose precise identity remains in dispute. Ms. Heindlmeier and her Ensemble La Ninfea...

There is today a revelatory voice afoot in the world of independent vocal jazz, and that divine gift belongs to Joanna Wallfisch. From a family of musicians and herself a Guildhall School of Music Masters graduate, this captivating British-born vocalist’s sophomore record, whimsically and...

Having fallen into obscurity shortly after the composer’s death, the music of Salomon Jadassohn has enjoyed a re-evaluation in recent years. This cpo release was my first acquaintance with the German composer’s music and based on the merits of what’s to be heard here,...

Tenor saxophonist Stanley ‘Mister T’ Turrentine (1934-2000), one among the many influential jazz musicians to emerge from Pittsburgh, PA, provides the inspiration and focus for the album under review consideration here.
Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Turrentine’s most endearing and notable...

This Bridge Records release of two books of songs by George Crumb makes for a very nice collector’s item. The songs, which have made few appearances on CD, are collected here in their entirety, and receive an elegant and thorough presentation as Volume 16 of Bridge’s Complete George...

What circumstances would compel a composer to purposely conceal his finest compositions, while at the same time publishing an abundance of, if not mediocre, certainly second-rate music? The name Carl Czerny (1791-1857) has been known to generations of pianists as the author of the most widely...

This album was an obvious recommendation hearing only the opening bars of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Suite from Dardanus, gracefully rendered with a sparkle and finesse that could stand easily beside any version I’ve heard. Musical sensibilities, tonal beauty, balance, intonation,...